Rap music creates cult heroes. It always has, and it always will. That's inherent in the way rap music works. The rappers who get famous are, by and large, people who came from massively disadvantaged backgrounds, who had to overcome every conceivable odd to find fame. Rap music depends on confidence and bravado, so it's always in rappers' interests to present themselves as unassailable titans. We...
In October, Sofia Coppola is releasing her next movie, On The Rocks -- which stars Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, and Marlon Wayans -- in select theaters and on Apple TV+. Today, the film's trailer was released and it features a brand-new Phoenix song called "Identical." Continuing their long history of collaboration (Coppola and Phoenix leader Thomas Mars are married), Phoenix wrote the On The Rocks...
Bad Religion is an institution. The legendary California punk outfit formed 40 years ago, when its founding members were all in high school. There have been a lot of twists and turns and rises and falls in the ensuing four decades, all of it an arc that defined Bad Religion as a resilient and influential group that helped codify a new punk sound for a new generation. Now, just in time for the milestone...
New York Senator Chuck Schumer is currently holding a conference outside Brooklyn's Baby's All Right in support of legislation to provide federal assistance for independent music venues. Beloved venues across the country have already shuttered thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, and according to a survey of the National Independent Venue Association, 90% of indie venues will be forced to close permanently...
Sometimes breathtaking music sounds like nothing you've ever heard before, and other times it sounds like entire histories springing back to life. Bully have always been the latter kind of band, the kind that specialize in making the old feel bracingly new. You could make an argument that slipping a lyric like "been praying for my period all week" into a no-frills rock song is a subversive act in such...
For months, the forthcoming Christopher Nolan film Tenet has been the subject of rampant online speculation. Part of that is because of the movie's release. Tenet was supposed to be the film that reopened movie theaters after the pandemic, and its release date has been changed a bunch of times. Finally, it looks like Tenet is coming out in at least a few American theaters next month, a week after it...
Last week, three women came forward to accuse Mark Kozelek, the musician behind Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters, of sexual misconduct in a Pitchfork expose. Now, Kozelek has issued a statement on his website denying the allegations against him and threatening legal action. "It is important that I publicly and unconditionally deny that I engaged in the inappropriate and disturbing incidents falsely...
It's poetry. The band whose shirt you can't buy is also the band whose members don't wear shirts. Onstage, the Santa Cruz band Gulch present a united front: Four or five young dudes, stringy and tatted-up, all wearing tight black jeans and no shirts. Hardcore is supposed to be a gimmick-averse genre, and yet Gulch's look is a great non-gimmick gimmick. They don't look like they've had a band meeting...
When Universal Pictures started the promotion cycle for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, they clearly didn’t know which angle to push. To be fair, the movie has got a lot going on. Edgar Wright’s geeky action-comedy romance, an adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series, follows 22-year-old slacker Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) as he…
When we first met Fontaines D.C., they were already exciting. Between early singles like “Hurricane Laughter” and “Boys In The Better Land” and raw and exhilarating gigs in Dublin, everything seemed to point towards them being one of the best in a sudden swell of young guitar bands coming from the UK and Ireland. Still,…
A year ago, Lauren Morgan, one half of the Orlando-based indie rock duo SALES, shrugged off her hometown. As Morgan explained to an interviewer, the Florida city, home to over a dozen theme parks, did not significantly shape her band’s identity. “More than anywhere we’re from the internet,” she said. For seven years, Morgan and…
Tonight, I’m going undercover as one of the 695 people in the Angel Olsen Cosmic Stream group chat. My code name? Virginia. My mission?
Jessy Lanza songs don’t stop moving. They’re rendered in twitchy shuffles, hypnotic little loops that operate like spinning tops. These kinds of songs were fully realized on her dementedly fun 2016 album Oh No, and four years later she’s refined them even more on her latest, All The Time. The album was predated by a…
My phone call with Patty Smyth is cut off just as the former Scandal singer starts talking about living on the same East Village street as her name-doppelgänger Patti Smith in the ’70s. “I was getting Patti Smith’s mail, and I didn’t know who that was at that time,” she says before the line abruptly…
If you know anything about Creed Bratton, you know he’s lived many lives. Most of us, of course, got to know him as the oddball scene-stealer on The Office. Bratton began as a background supporting character, playing a bizarro fictionalized version of himself. His character came close to being written off in the second season,…
We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.…
At any point during 2018 or 2019, do you remember thinking, man, it doesn’t get any better than this? “It feels weird to be nostalgic for anything that happened post-2016,” Sarah Tudzin jokes, but even if every year is indeed “the worst one ever, until the next one,” at least the slow-burn success of Illuminati…
We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.…
We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.…
Anyone who has ever seen the Eurovision Song Contest knows that it’s a spectacle like no other. Between the elaborate special effects, outlandish costumes, and dramatic ballads and upbeat pop songs peppered with awkwardly translated English lyrics, the long-running European institution is ripe for parody. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story Of Fire Saga — starring…
The last time the Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch released an album was in 2017, and chances are you could still be making sense of that music nearly three years later. The colossal, mind-expanding Mirror Reaper was one 83-minute song that completely warped your sense of time as it stretched everything out into a…
In 2017, Phoebe Bridgers released her debut Stranger In The Alps. With that album alone, she was already greeted as one of the most exciting, assured young songwriters newly on the scene. But in the ensuing years, Bridgers’ stature as a respected musician and generational voice has risen significantly, and quickly. The following year, she…
You could never question Jay Watson’s psych-rock bona fides. The man’s resume, of course, includes Tame Impala, the band that implausibly made the leap from being weirdo hallucinogenic rockers from western Australia to arena-conquerors worldwide. But all along the way, Watson also played in Pond, Tame’s sister band. And alongside that, he’s been putting out…